The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 12

12 THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1937 FORGERIES OF PARIS WEEK WEEK ART TREASURES THE STRANGE POWERS OF AN ABBE tenth 61 a little saving of less than a "LA CHASSE" BEGINS IN EXHIBITION VIENNA THE PROVINCIALS THE LOST PERSONS FOUND THE END OF HOLIDAYS VISITORS THINK THEM CAME TO PARIS BEAUTIFUL ILLEGAL GAMING MACHINES SEARCH FOR MISSING CHILD 4k "I li A TYPICAL FRENCH VILLAGE CARRIED OFF BY AN EAGLE penny, a time. The Gambling Fever. As for the gambling lever, it is only necessary to quote the enormous success of the machines which enabled the working man, after dropping a modest coin into a slot, to try to win a prize by picking up a lucky number with a fish-hook or by flicking a ball into the right hole, The recent decision of the Council of Ministers to make these machines illegal has produced the most surprising revelations as to the profits made by their owners, even after paying 50 per cent, to the landlords of the cafes and other places where they were fixed. The average takings thus divided are said to have been as much as the equivalent of five pounds a day, of course free of all the taxes paid by more normal forms of commerce. It is not surprising that an elaborate gangsterism had grown up around this easy way of making money, and that the independent owner found his machine constantly and mysteriously out of order or even removed altogether until he paid tribute' to the ring.

Nearly four hundred machines had thus disappeared during the first seven months of this year in the Paris district. Le Centre Rural There is a part of the Exhibition which is visited by relatively few foreigners; for it is separated by a considerable distance from the large area which is covered by. the principal sections on both sfies of the Seine, and is situated between the Porte Dauphine and the Porte Maillot, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. There is, however, nothing which is better worth a visit and nothing which is more charac From Our Own Correspondent VIENNA, Saturday A highly interesting little exhibition of well-known forgeries of art treasures has been opened at the Kunsthistoris'ches Museum (the present State Gallery, formerly the art collections of the Habsburg family), in Vienna. The keepers, Dr.

Planiscig and Dr. Kris, who were responsible for the arrangement, state in the foreword to the catalogue that what we are. showing here came into our hands mostly by chance, and to get these pieces has been very difficult. It is not everybody who will admit that he (or she) has been the victim of a From Our Own Correspondent PARIS, Saturday For most ordinary people the summer holidays are now over. It is true that it is only the elementary schools which have reopened with, the month, and that the new term of the secondary schools does not begin until October, while the "rentree" of Parliament and the Sorbonne forger." is not until November.

But the dead As Dr. explained to nae, it is almost impossible to acquire first class" forgeries for the purposes of such an ex- period for Paris has come to an end. Taxis piled with returning luggage are con rf Hauinp hppn rinnfwl Rut This Exposition year the Provincials came to Paris with their Hats. "Ah!" said the excited designers We think of something very new. Paris must have peasant Hats.

Just a leetle different, Ah Oui and we'll make it so chic to be provincial and they did. Harvey Nichols copies are the Square, Cote D'Azur felt, the high crown stantly to be seen in the streets. Flats are throwing open the shutters which had long been closed. Rolls of carpets are returning from the cleaners. The understudies have been replaced by the principals at the theatres, where new plays are in rehearsal.

Most important of all, teristically It is called Le la chasse has begun; for it is really Centre Rural," and it illustrates the activities of agricultural France in a number of buildings which are grouped to form a typical French village, with its mairie. its post office, and its. farms; for France From Our Own Correspondent GENEVA, Saturday The recent death of Abbe Mermet removes yet another of those Catholic priests who, like Mendel, will be remembered rather for their services to science than for their eminence in the Church. The Abbe Mermet practised and developed more than fifty years a system of radio-aesthetics concerning which there is still some doubt whether it should be classed as pure science or as science with an admixture of art and personality. The Abbe himself always strenuously denied that his own personality had anything to do with his remarkable achievements in radio-aesthetics, and maintained to the last that he was as much a scientist as any student of chemical reactions.

Like many of those whose life-work has lain in French Switzerland, the Abbe Mermet was a Frenchman," having been born near Annecy seventy-one years ago. But the whole of his working life was spent in Switzerland, and throughout all his experience in the strange science which he did so much to develop he remained a simple, hardworking parish priest. WATER DIVINING The Abbe's radio-aesthetics sprang from his interest in the age-old practice of water-divining. In 1883 there" was a terrible drought in Western Switzerland, and the Abbe did great service to his parishioners of the moment -in discovering hidden streams for them by means of a pendulum which he had invented, and which he spent a large part of the rest of his life in perfecting. The remarkable feature of Abb6 Mer-met's early divinations was their accuracy.

Time and' again the depth at which he announced that water would be found was correct within a few inches, and so were his predictions about the flow per minute of the water. Some of his suc that which has brought so many men back to their homes, from which they will set out, with their does, every Sunday until the end of the winter, to shoot partridges and hares pheasants only for the occasional rich in some village or other within easy rail or motor distance the farms are nearly always in the village. These houses for they are built solidly and are not mere lath and planter constitute a-whole series of model workshops for the industries of the dairy, the with petersham on felt, the vft rolled of Paris. The fact that the ouverture. there are also forty photos exhibited, amongst them being the best masterpieces of the well known Alceo Dossena.

TRAGIC EXPOSURES The catalogue again explains The exhibited forgeries originate from public and private collections. For obvious reasons we had to omit the name of the owner, nor could we describe the history of each forgery." Especially in connection with Dossena's imitations the writer of the preface sighs one must remember that each object has its own history, that it concerns a phenomenal gain of fame, and then the exposing of the whole, and that each object (of Dossena) exhibited here was chief participant in if not a tragedy at least a tragi-comedy." It would be impossible to enumerate all the exhibited objects, and one can only mention such things as a wonderful forged bronze statuette, depicting a Niobide," the" plaster cast of a statuette of Francesco di Sant'Agata (Padua, about 1520) in the Kaiser Friedrieh Museum in Berlin a highly successful forgery as far as casting and ageing imitation are concerned, which was believed for a long time to be an original." There are all kinds of things exhibited. Bronze and marble statuettes, wood-carvings, ceramics, wood and ivory relief statues, swords, daggers, and so on. Most which is always on the first Sunday in September for the northern half of vineyard, the growing of fruit, the raising brim off the head, green, black, of cattle. There are the beasts themselves in the most modern of cow houses, France, came later than usual this year has slightly retarded the returning flow, which may also have been held up by the with every perferted appliance.

There are the living rooms of the farmer. There is brown, navy. Each 210 unexplained fact that the number of shooting licences just taken out in Paris. his vegetable garden. There are the dwellings of his workmen.

Then there are the buildings of the corn, fruit, and is considerably less than in 1936 6,700 as against 8,715. All the same, the Paris winter season may be said to have begun. wine co-operative societies, in the last of which the visitor can buy a glass of Petty Saving any one of very numerous wines which One of the national characteristics which seem paradoxical until their simple are made in France. Rush-Hour Dangers. to an interesting set of statistics just issued by the traffic department of the visitors come to the conclusion that the forgeries are so beautiful that i one can hardly be angry with the forgers.

LIGHTER SIDE OF WAR explanation presents itself is that the; Frenchman is not only a miser but also a gambler. His passion for painfully accumulating money instead of spending it throws him particularly open to the temptation to increase his hoard by speculation, especially when the stakes are small and the odds sufficiently, long to hold out hopes of a big haul; and the savings of many a modest person have been lost in a mad attempt to triple them when it has been realised that they would not in themselves be sufficient to assure a comfortable old age or to provide a daughter's marriage portion. Examples of the passion for petty saving and of the delirium of gambling are met with every day. Among the most recent of the former is the sudden popularity of the automatic telephones in Metro, stations and post-offices; for they have not yet been adjusted to the new rate of 65 centimes a call, which is already being charged to subscribers. Consequently hundreds of the latter have been going outside in order to make that JAPAN'S CONVENTI ONAL of the Prefecture of Police, there are two notably dangerous hours of the day for pedestrians in Paris.

The first is between two and three in the afternoon, and the other between six and seven. That the rush hour, when everyone is going home, should produce many accidents, will seem normal to the town dweller of any country, although I doubt whether in any other capital than Paris that rush is so concentrated and short. It is really hardly more than half an hour, from twenty minutes to seven until ten minutes past, after which the streets are cleared as if by magic. That other rush, between two and three: and, in fact, chiefly around two o'clock is, I peculiarly Parisian. It shows that the workers of Paris, men or women, cling tenaciously to their habit of going home to lunch instead of lunching near their work, and the rush represents their anxiety to get back to their offices and their shops in time to be there when the shutters are pushed up again at two.

ADJECTIVES cesses in the sphere of water-divining have passed into legend in Switzei.and. They are, nevertheless, historical facts. In later years the Abbe extended the use of his pendulum to the discovery of diseases in the human body. Indeed he may be said to have been the forerunner of a new and successful method of diagnosis. "PENDULUM METHOD" The Abbe's "pendulum" method has also been applied with success to the discovery of petrol, and even in the search for objects or persons who have disappeared.

There is one well-attested story of his having found the body of a child who had been carried off by an eagle in the Valais mountains. In the matter of disappearances, however, ss the Abbe himself would have been the first to admit, his method was not always successful. Thus he failed when called in over the Prince affair. There can be little doubt that the personality of the Abbe himself counted for much in the proper employment of his pendulum." Those who saw him at work said that the instrument seemed to come tlive in his hands, and there must remain some doubt whether anyone but the Abbi! himself could have divined water merely by using his "pendulum" over a large-scale map. But the Abbe's own successes remain incontestable.

Furthermore, he had disciples who have obtainprf nm re From Our Own Correspondent TOKYO Even wars have their lighter sides; and Japanese newspaper comment on the course of hostilities in China, while very serious intent, is not in frequently amusing. The Japanese, in public statements and Press com fflAIttVIETC NICIHMMLS LONDON'S FOREMOST FASHION SPECIALISTS ment, follow the methods of epic poets WW in invariably employing conventional adjectives and phrases in charac HUNGARY'S NATIONAL THEATRE terising given situations. Street- Floor For instance, the Japanese troops, what sults from following his methods. It is to be presumed that the science (or art) of radio-aesthetics will not die with this simple and devout old priest. ever they may have been doing, are always patient the Chinese are just as monotonously and regularly outrageous." Every Chinese act of hostility, regardless of the circumstances, is Hirvey Nichols London, S.W.I the long-wanted institution.

Money flowed into the theatre's coffers. The site JUBILEE NEXT MONTH of the building was a gift from Prince illegal every Japanese military move WOMAN ATTACKED BY OWLS is presumea to conform to tne nignest standards of international legality. So, during the recent fighting around Nan-kow, north-west of Peking, the Japanese official report was to the effect that, while one Chinese unit turned and fled, the other illegally attacked the Japanese. NURSERY OF FAMOUS ARTISTS The Japanese have also overworked the PIETERSBURG (North Transvaal) A woman named Boyer has been set upon in broad daylight by owls and severely injured at Zoetdooms. lortv miles from here.

Accompanied by her dog, she was walking in a dry river bed near her home. Suddenly two great owls swooped down and clawed her face and head. Her cads for -help attracted the attention of other people on the farm, and eventually the birds were beaten off. Renter. word sincerity," until it has become almost a byword.

Any failure to comply with Japanese demands is characterised as proof positive of complete lack of sincerity." During the tortuous negotiations which ended in severe fighting lirassalKovich, the richest magnate of nis time. One citizen paid for a hundred seats. A buttonmaker sent three hundred florins, arid a tailor sent a Hungarian prince's costume and twelve other costumes for hero rdles. Another tailor sent one: hundred florins and a green costume; a bootmaker sent thirty pairs of high boots for -the supers; and a hatter sent copies of historical hats to the value of four hundred florins. A labourer called George Lukacs won immortality by carrying tiles to the of the building for a fortnight for nothing.

For a year the National Theatre was lit by candles, and when gas-light was introduced such enthusiasm was excited that the master locksmith who had installed it was hauled before the curtain and received a tempestuous ovation from the audience. The theatre prices at that time were not regarded as cheap, but they compare favourably with those of the present day prices. A box on the ground floor or first floor cost ten shillings, a stall two and SHADES OF BEAU BRUMMELL Here are waistcoats tailored to the taste of the Beau himself. Buy all three and you'll be as economical as you're elegant because with these you can make one suit do the work of a whole, daytime wardrobe. around Peking and Tientsin a Govern mental spokesman, receiving foreign cor From Our Own Correspondent BUDAPEST, Saturday The centenary of Hungary's first theatre, the National has been celebrated by the placing of a gold wreath at the site of the original building and by the production of the ninety-nine-year-old farce, first per respondents, expatiated on tne sincere Chinese who were in favour of accepting all of Japan's most fair and just demands," and the insincere ones who were interfering with the course of negotiations.

A waggish correspondent excited a general laugh by inquiring: What's the use of negotiating with those sincere fellows if there are so many insincere ones to upset everything? 02 formed at the theatre, The Notary of Peleske." The first home of Hungarian drama was pulled down in .1908, and fouripence, and standing room in the the National Theatre took up its abode in the former People's Theatre in EDUCATION IN MALAYA gallery (or "rooster's four-pence. The first author's fee, two hundred and fifty florins, was paid to the poet VorSsmarty, for his' prologue The Awakening of Arpad," with which the Rakoczi-street, resigning all hope of 25f. vjv theatre was opened. At the coming jubilee performance in the National VILLAGERS BUILD THEIR OWN SCHOOL Theatre on October 7, Vorosmarty's pro logue will strain be nerformed. while the passing on to a new building when the world war broke out.

To-day Budapest boasts of many new theatres, but the National Theatre remains the revered possession of the nation, and the dramatists, both native and foreign, whose plays are produced there receive the hall-mark of literary excellence. Love of declamation forms a leading trait in Hungarian character, and at the beginning of the past century the Opera House will mark the occasion by reviving one act of the oldest Hungarian opera, Bela's Flight," by Ruzicska. HAMLET PERFORMANCES For nearly half a century the National Theatre sandwiched drama between operas, operettes, and people's peasant plays. It was not till the opening of the People's Theatre in 1875 and the Opera House in 1884 that it became the nursery Snow white waistcoat of marcetla the same stuff of which a man's stiff formal shirt front is made double breasted and severely smart. From Our Own Correspondent SINGAPORE The Malays of the Unfederated Malay State of Kelantan, one of the most isolated parts of British Malaya and the most backward area of the country, are beginning to take an increased interest in education.

Mr. G. A. de C. de Moubray, the acting British Adviser in the State, says that the old apathy towards education has now completely gone.

In many parts, the villagers themselves have helped with work and materials in building temporary schools at small cost to the State. These schools will eventually be replaced by permanent buildingsv In one villaee which I have visited," Mr. de Moubray writes. a mosque and a school, each costing about 3,000 dollars (about 360) have been donated by a rich villager. Another' jschool which would have normally cost, about 4,000 dollars (about 480) was built with (the assistance of a contribution or 1,500 dollars (about 180) from the State.

The (Villagers themselves baked bricks folr the foundations and flooring of the school, and the scout troop in the village assisted in floating and hauling timber and in thatching the roof." public began to clamour tor a tneatre in which they could heir their own language. FIRST APPEARANCE There was a German theatre in the city, and the little theatre near the War Office in the Buda' fortress (which had been made from a monastery by Emperor Joseph) was also under German management. In this little theatre, in October, 1790, Hungarian actors made their first appearance inside stone walli. But opportunities to play in a theatre were rare, and in the nineteenth century famous actors and actresses, including the enchanting Mrs. Dery, Roza Labor falvi (who became the wife of Jokai, the Hungarian Dickens), and the famous Shakespearean actors.

Egressy. Megvety. and Lendvay, were obliged to act in a wooden arena called the Rondella." On the initiative of Count Szechenyi, the greatest Magyar," and Gabor of famous dramatists, and brought up a generation of famous players under the brilliant directorship of Ede Paulay. It was due to Mr. Paulay that Madach's Tragedy of Man was adapted for the stage and given its first performance in 1883.

It is Interesting to note that the first foreign plays to be performed in Hungary were by Shakespeare. In 1794 Hamlet was played for the first time by the director of the Kolozsvar theatre. In 1826 Hamlet came to the little theatre in the Buda fortress, and shortly after Shakespeare's plays were performed all over the provinces. In 1838 King Lear" was produced at the National Theatre. The great lyric poet, Petofi, made a translation of Coriolanus," and in 1847 joined another great poet, Arany, and Vorosmarty, in the translation of all Shakespeare's works, but his part in the Knitted Tattersall Waistcoat.

Wear this ore when you're off to the country, and five in it after you get there. Yellow, yellow and white, yellow and nigger, red. red and white or red and black, BrocateNe bound with velvet a matinee and cocktail waistcoat patterned like a lovely French brocade. Rose oerge or pale green. Town and Country Clothes for Women, Fourth Floor Foidvary.

the then Governor of the county of Pest, the National Theatre was BRE founded, and the nation poured gilts on Freedom War..